Allen Ginsberg Poems

Allen GinsbergIrwin Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an
American poet. Ginsberg is best known for Howl (1956), a long poem about the
self-destruction of his friends of the Beat Generation and what he saw as the
destructive forces of materialism and conformity in the United States at the
time.
Ginsberg was born into a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey. He grew up in
nearby Paterson. His father Louis Ginsberg was a poet and a high school teacher.
Ginsberg's mother, Naomi Livergant Ginsberg (who was affected by epileptic
seizures and mental illnesses such as paranoia) was an active member of the
Communist Party and often took Ginsberg and his brother Eugene to party
meetings. Ginsberg later said that his mother "Made up bedtime stories that all
went something like: 'The good king rode forth from his castle, saw the
suffering workers and healed them.'"
As a young teenager, Ginsberg began to write letters to The New York Times about
political issues such as World War II and workers' rights. When he was in
junior high school, he accompanied his mother by bus to her therapist. The trip
disturbed Ginsberg - he mentioned it and other moments from his childhood in his
long autobiographical poem "Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg (1894-1956)." While in
high school, Ginsberg began reading Walt Whitman; he said he was inspired by his
teacher's passion in reading.
In 1943 Ginsberg graduated from Eastside High School and briefly attended
Montclair State University before entering Columbia University on a scholarship
from the Young Men's Hebrew Association of Paterson, (1949). While at
Columbia, Ginsberg contributed to the Columbia Review literary journal, the
Jester humor magazine, won the Woodberry Poetry Prize and served as president of
the Philolexian Society, the campus literary and debate group.
In Ginsberg's freshman year at Columbia he met fellow undergraduate Lucien Carr,
who introduced him to a number of future Beat writers including Jack Kerouac,
William S. Burroughs, and John Clellon Holmes. They bonded because they saw in
one another excitement about the potential of the youth of America, a potential
which existed outside the strict conformist confines of post-WWII McCarthy-era
America. Ginsberg and Carr talked excitedly about a "New Vision" (a phrase
adapted from Arthur Rimbaud) for literature and America. Carr also introduced
Ginsberg to Neal Cassady, for whom Ginsberg had a long infatuation. Kerouac
later described the meeting between Ginsberg and Cassady in the first chapter of
his 1957 novel On the Road. Kerouac saw them then as the dark (Ginsberg) and
light (Cassady) side of their "New Vision." Kerouac's perception had to do
partly with Ginsberg's association with Communism (though Ginsberg himself was
never a Communist); Kerouac called Ginsberg "Carlo Marx" in On the Road. This
was a source of strain in their relationship since Kerouac grew increasingly
distrustful of Communism.